Anthropological archaeology

‘Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’, is a statement with which many archaeologistswould strongly agree. As a statement of disciplinary identity, it is odd, contradictory and notat all straightforward. It seems somewhat unusual to define one discipline in terms of another.As far as I know, no one has ever said anthropology is archaeology or it is nothing. Not todefine archaeology in its own terms appears intellectually lazy, bad academic politics andlacking in disciplinary self-confidence. However, people who take this view are not givingup their disciplinary identity. Instead we are indicating that archaeology is part of a broadfield of study, composed of archaeology, social/cultural anthropology, physical anthropologyand linguistics. This larger field is often known as anthropology, which is taken to be thestudy of all aspects of human life, past and present. Within anthropology, conceived broadly,social/cultural anthropology studies the people of the present, originally concentrating onso-called small-scale societies but increasingly focusing on the structures of life in the west aswell. Social/cultural anthropology uses the method of participant observation, whichAnthropology and archaeology 3involves immersing oneself inthe life of the group being studied, learning their language (ifnecessary) and producing some sort of synthetic account of the experience. This is somethingvery different to the excavation and analysis of archaeological evidence, or the study oflanguage as such, or the bodily aspects of human existence and evolution. This book is aboutthe relationship between archaeology and social/cultural anthropology, within the broaderfield of anthropology.When I started this book, I thought it was a hopeless task, but now I know I was beingoptimistic. Part of my optimism was wanting to include an account of physical anthropology,although I was realistic enough to know that I could only mention linguistics in passing. Mysin of omission in leaving out physical anthropology came about when I realised themagnitude of the task and it would take another book to explore the three-way relationsbetween archaeology, social and cultural anthropology and physical anthropology. I havetaken the dishonourable route of leaving out any systematic discussion of physicalanthropology at all.It also needs mentioning that social/cultural anthropology is very varied, as alreadyimplied by my joint designation. For reasons I hope will become clear as the book proceeds,there have been shifting definitions of anthropology over time. Some people have stressedthe social structure provided by kinship as being the key element of life to be studied: thesewere self-proclaimed social anthropologists. For others, the crucial factor is culture, whichranges between the material objects that people make and use, to their sets of beliefs andviews of the world. Today it is probably true to say that culture is in the ascendant, althoughthere is much overlap and many sensibly decline to waste too much effort defining anydividing line too closely, as it is impossible to decide where society stops and culture starts orto give relative weight to each. Nevertheless both terms are in common use to designateslightly different forms of anthropology and this needs acknowledging. Other terms ofimportance are ‘ethnography’ and ‘ethnology’, which tend to refer to the observable aspectsof a society encountered by the anthropologist in the field, the basic data observed (to use ascientific metaphor). Ethnographic data are synthesised back home and combined withtheory to produce a rounded anthropology. Ethnography was often seen as the equivalent ofexcavation and therefore somewhat looked down on as basic toil, whereas the reallyworthwhile activity was the synthetic and comparative work of anthropology carried out onthe data. Today, with a greater emphasis on material culture and practical action in general,ethnography is less of a second-class activity and there is some overlap between culturalanthropology and ethnography.In a some ways it makes no sense to attempt to look at the relationship betweenarchaeology and anthropology, as neither are single entities. There is much internal variety,with archaeologists defining themselves as scientific, ecological, historical as well asanthropological. Also, there are differences in the meaning of anthropological archaeologyin different times and varying places. In order to give a sketch of this variety I shall look at4 Anthropology and archaeologythe divergent meanings given to the term ‘anthropological archaeology’ on the two sidesofthe Atlantic and how usages in north America and Britain have changed over time. Thiswill be a limited history covering the last forty years, the period in which current positionsand debates have been defined; the longer-term history of the last 150 years is consideredlater in chapters 2 to 5.